"Let’s do the deal, they said, go to the regulator, ask."
The head of Interros, Vladimir Potanin, spoke about how, against the backdrop of a wave of sanctions four years ago, he acquired two major credit organizations in Russia. His interview was published in Forbes.
"It was clear where everything was heading, and I decided to transfer several hundred million dollars that were in accounts at Western banks into some investments in Russia," the billionaire explained. After that, Potanin shared, he first received a call from the head of Rosbank, who complained that he was "tired" of the claims regarding operations in Russia and offered to sell the asset "for any money"; later it became known that Oleg Tinkov was exiting the domestic business and his team was looking for a buyer for the bank.
"Let’s do the deal, they said, go to the regulator, ask," Potanin described the events of those days. He noted that the head of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, did not object to his return to the banking business. As a result, in the second case, the deal "matured literally in three to four days," since the seller needed someone whom the Central Bank would allow to sell a systemically important bank and who was able to pay quickly.
Both deals in question were concluded in the spring of 2022. Later, Rosbank joined T-bank as a branch. Potanin estimated the cost of purchasing the latter in May 2022 at hundreds of millions of dollars, noting that this was a large sum for him. "There was the price of the package itself, plus some amount of bonds, plus La Datcha. It came to about 400 million dollars. La Datcha was sold immediately; I don’t even know to whom," he shared now.
